Nuclear fusion

A controlled fusion reaction has generated more energy than was put into the system for the first time, bringing viable fusion power another step closer to ...

“In terms of clean energy, this [fusion research] is definitely the most ambitious route, but eventually will be the most rewarding because the amount of energy that you can unlock is potentially limitless.” “We’re at extremes of pressures, densities and temperatures that we’ve never been able to access in the laboratory before,” he says. There’s a lot of exchange of information between the two schemes,” he says. She said that now it has been confirmed, it is likely that a laser-based power plant could be constructed within a “few decades”, but that the technology for tokamak reactors was more mature. “If we stick at trying to do this through massive-scale projects, which take billions of dollars to construct and tens of years to develop, it could well be that fusion arises too late to have an impact on climate change,” says Chittenden. “There are very significant hurdles, not just in the science, but in technology,” she said. [Jeremy Chittenden](https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/j.chittenden) at Imperial College London says the experiment is a historic moment for fusion research. [nearing completion](/article/2280763-worlds-most-powerful-magnet-being-shipped-to-iter-fusion-reactor/) and its first experiments are due to start in 2025. [emerged on 11 December](/article/2350921-nuclear-fusion-has-there-been-a-breakthrough-and-what-will-it-mean/), but the news has been formally announced in a press conference today. Earlier this year, JET sustained a reaction for 5 seconds, producing a [record 59 megajoules of heat energy](/article/2307548-fusion-energy-record-suggests-we-really-could-build-artificial-suns/#:~:text=The%20experiment%20at%20the%20Joint,a%20second%2C%20set%20in%201997.). For the first time on Earth, a controlled fusion reaction has generated more power than it requires to run, researchers have confirmed. NIF uses the second approach, known as inertial confinement fusion (ICF), where a tiny capsule containing hydrogen fuel is blasted with lasers, causing it to heat up and rapidly expand.

Nuclear fusion does not rely on fossil fuels or produce harmful greenhouse gases, so could also help tackle climate change. What is nuclear fusion? Nuclear ...

It is the opposite of nuclear fission, in which heavy atoms are split apart. Widescale use of nuclear fusion could help countries The conditions required to start and maintain a fusion reaction are so extreme that it is impossible for it to run out of control. Nuclear fusion does not rely on fossil fuels like oil or gas, and produces none of the greenhouse gases which drive global warming. The lower level of radioative waste produced by the process compared with nuclear fission is also much easier to handle and store. Despite a series of promising breakthroughs in the last few years, large-scale nuclear fusion is still several years away. When two atoms of a light element such as hydrogen are heated and combine to form a single heavier element such as helium, the nuclear reaction produces massive amounts of energy which can be captured. The waste produced by nuclear fusion is less radioactive and decays much more quickly. Nuclear fusion is the process which gives the Sun its energy. Nuclear fusion breakthrough – what is it and how does it work? How does nuclear fusion work? Why is nuclear fusion so important?

The experiment took place at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. LLNL director Dr Kim Budil said: ...

The experiment was only able to produce enough energy to boil about 15-20 kettles and required billions of dollars of investment. With ignition now achieved, not only fusion energy is unlocked, but also a door is opening to new science." Nuclear fusion is described as the "holy grail" of energy production. Until now, no experiment has managed to produce more energy than the amount put in to make it work. Fission is the technology currently used in nuclear power stations, but the process also produces a lot of waste that continues to give out radiation for a long time. The National Ignition Facility in California is a US$3.5 billion (NZ$5.4bn) experiment.

It requires conditions found in the Sun, but promises nearly limitless, carbon-free energy - and now scientists for the first time have used the process to ...

Whyte said the fuel has to be hotter than the centre of the sun. For fusion to be viable, it will need to produce significantly more power and for longer. US President Joe Biden called the breakthrough a good example of the need to continue to invest in research and development. Billions of dollars and decades of work have gone into fusion research that has produced exhilarating results – for fractions of a second. One approach to fusion turns hydrogen into plasma, an electrically charged gas, which is then controlled by enormous magnets. “You can't say that you have a car.” “Look what’s going on from the Department of Energy on the nuclear front. Proponents of fusion hope that it could one day offer nearly limitless, carbon-free energy and displace fossil fuels and other traditional energy sources. Maddie Burakoff reported from New York, Michael Phillis from St. Producing energy that powers homes and businesses from fusion is still decades away. Unlike other nuclear reactions, it doesn't create radioactive waste. [nuclear fusion reaction](https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/explained/300763889/why-fusion-could-be-a-cleanenergy-breakthrough?rm=a) than was used to ignite it – a major breakthrough in the decades-long quest to harness the process that powers the sun.

Harvard scientist Adam Cohen breaks down breakthrough that might prove major turning point in clean energy efforts — but not any time soon.

But if you look at the electrical energy that was used to drive the lasers to produce that light, that was vastly more than the energy that was released in the reaction, and if you imagine trying to build an actual power plant, then you would have to take the heat and the neutrons that were released from this reaction and use them to make steam and use that steam to power turbines. In this case, there was more energy released from the reaction than in the photons in the light that went into compressing and heating this capsule. Three megajoules of energy is about the energy you would get from eating a jelly doughnut, about 500 It’s the basis of the sun, and it’s the basis of thermonuclear weapons — hydrogen bombs. So just to give you a sense of the scale — the energy released in this shot was about three megajoules. So, 500 kilocalories is a lot, but this is a multi-billion-dollar facility and it can fire one of these shots every eight hours. COHEN: Mass comes in discrete chunks, and if you add up the mass of a helium and the neutron that comes flying out too in this process, there’s a little bit of a difference. So the primary purpose of the facility is really for simulating the conditions in those bombs and understanding the physics there. So a little bit of the mass of the hydrogen isotopes that are getting fused together goes into energy, which comes out of this reaction. The primary purpose of the National Ignition Facility is not actually renewable energy; it’s around stockpile stewardship. And when the hydrogen isotopes fuse to make that helium nucleus in the process of them sticking to each other, that releases a lot of energy. [fusion](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/13/science/nuclear-fusion-energy-breakthrough.html) with a net energy gain, the U.S.

In today's newsletter: US scientists this week announced progress on a potentially revolutionary source of renewable energy. But there's still a way to go.

[thanks to a first-half penalty from Lionel Messi](https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/dec/13/argentina-croatia-world-cup-semi-final-match-report) and two further goals from Julián Álvarez set up by Messi. Nimo [In this week’s TechScape](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/13/techscape-twitter-files-elon-musk), Alex Hern read “the Twitter Files” so you don’t have to. [spent 33 hours in an NHS hospital](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/dec/13/like-a-horrific-board-game-33-hours-inside-an-nhs-in-crisis), and their findings unveiled just how deep the crisis in the health service has gotten. [Sign up for TechScape here](https://www.theguardian.com/info/2022/sep/20/sign-up-for-the-techscape-newsletter-our-free-technology-email). And so long as it doesn’t become an excuse for ignoring the urgency of the only realistic solution to the climate crisis, a rapid transition to renewables, it’s not like it presents much competition for funding: the total investment in private companies working on fusion ever is about $4.8bn, the [Fusion Industry Association says](https://www.fusionindustryassociation.org/copy-of-about-the-fusion-industry). “You’re not a billionaire worthy of the name unless you’re investing in ambitious devices. There are huge hurdles to overcome.” Kim Budil of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said yesterday that “a few decades of research on the underlying technologies could put us in a position to build a power plant”. It is cumulative emissions that matter to avoiding the worst impact of the climate crisis, and so even if fusion plants are online at scale by 2050, that is too late. “So, OK, the energy put in has resulted in a larger amount of energy coming out – but the big caveat is that it depends where you draw your perimeter: powering the lasers themselves required way more energy. [the power source for Iron Man’s suit](https://www.iter.org/mag/6/47), or the basis of the [Mr Fusion Home Energy Reactor](https://backtothefuture.fandom.com/wiki/Mr._Fusion) that powers the, er, flux capacitor in Back to the Future. Beyond the obvious virtue of a net energy yield, “It’s low carbon, it offers baseload [that is, consistent] energy unlike renewables at the moment, and you don’t have to worry about it melting down or producing nuclear waste to the same extent,” Bluck said. Today’s Grinch-like (but also very interesting!) newsletter, with Dr Michael Bluck, director of the Centre for Nuclear Engineering at Imperial College London, is about the long distance from a remarkable breakthrough to an energy utopia – and why fusion won’t help us get to net zero.

Researchers at the US National Ignition Facility created a reaction that made more energy than they put in.

“A result like this will bring increased interest in the progress of all types of fusion, so it should have a positive impact on fusion research in general,” says Luce. “I don’t want to give you a sense that we’re going to plug the NIF into the grid: that is definitely not how this works,” she said during a press conference in Washington DC. NIF was not designed with commercial fusion energy in mind — and many researchers doubt that laser-driven fusion will be the approach that ultimately yields fusion energy. Once the reactor starts working towards fusion, currently planned for 2035, it will aim to reach ‘burning’ stage, “where the self-heating power is the dominant source of heating”, Luce explains. Nevertheless, Campbell thinks that its latest success could boost confidence in the promise of laser fusion power and spur a programme focused on energy applications. In addition to boosting the laser’s power by around 8%, scientists reduced the number of imperfections in the target and adjusted how they delivered the laser energy to create a more spherical implosion. It took more than a decade, “but they can be commended for reaching their goal”, says Stephen Bodner, a physicist who formerly headed the laser plasma branch of the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. On one level, it’s about proving what is possible, and many scientists have hailed the result as a milestone in fusion science. The facility used its set of 192 lasers to deliver 2.05 megajoules of energy onto a pea-sized gold cylinder containing a frozen pellet of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium. The laser’s pulse of energy caused the capsule to collapse, reaching temperatures only seen in stars and thermonuclear weapons, and the hydrogen isotopes fused into helium, releasing additional energy and creating a cascade of fusion reactions. Ultimately, scientists scrapped efforts to replicate that shot, and rethought the experimental design — a choice that paid off last week. “It’s an incredible accomplishment,” says Mark Herrmann, the deputy programme director for fundamental weapons physics at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which houses the fusion laboratory.

Nuclear fusion reactions power the sun and other stars. In a fusion reaction, 2 light nuclei of atoms merge to form a single heavier nucleus. The leftover mass ...

Here’s how nuclear fusion works to make stars shine. Makes a great gift!](https://earthskystore.org/products/earthsky-lunar-calendar) [Human World](https://earthsky.org/human-world/) Fusion can involve many different elements in the periodic table. The leftover mass becomes energy. Here’s how nuclear fusion works to power the sun and stars. [a milestone for climate and clean energy](https://apnews.com/article/science-business-california-climate-and-environment-d6cb7b048ce916e04be809482fd9cbe6).

The promise of abundant, clean energy powered by nuclear fusion is one big step closer thanks to a new experiment. The results are a historic scientific ...

[pursuing different techniques](https://theconversation.com/nuclear-fusion-hit-a-milestone-thanks-to-better-reactor-walls-this-engineering-advance-is-building-toward-reactors-of-the-future-178870). government [completed construction of the National Ignition Facility in 2009](https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/nif-construction), it was the most powerful laser facility in the world, able to deliver [1 million joules of energy to a target](https://www.llnl.gov/news/national-ignition-facility-achieves-unprecedented-1-megajoule-laser-shot). [The Conversation](https://theconversation.com) under a Creative Commons license. [very challenging to sustain](https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4865400), and any [small imperfection in the capsule or fuel](https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6587/ab49f4) can increase the energy requirement and decrease efficiency. [abundant in sea water, tritium is much rarer](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fusengdes.2010.11.040). In the meantime, there are [other methods available to produce the needed fuel](https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/articles/nnsa-achieves-record-number-tritium-extraction-operations). [invented in 1960](https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/284158_townes.html). [released 3 million joules](https://www.llnl.gov/news/national-ignition-facility-achieves-fusion-ignition). The 2 million joules it produces today is 50 times more energetic than the [next most powerful laser on Earth](https://www.lle.rochester.edu/index.php/omega-laser-facility-2/). If you can maintain these conditions for a long enough time, the [fuel will fuse and release energy](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-021-01485-9). This result has shown that fusion ignition is possible, but it will take a lot of work to improve the efficiency to the point where fusion can provide a net positive energy return when taking into consideration the entire end-to-end system, not just a single interaction between the lasers and the fuel. 5, 2022, the National Ignition Facility shot a pellet of fuel with 2 million joules of laser energy – about the amount of power it takes to run a hair dryer for 15 minutes – all contained within a few billionths of a second.

The breakthrough in nuclear fusion is likely to spark investment in the technology that could transform the global energy landscape with nearly limitless ...

Investors are on track to pour more than $1 billion into the technology this year. [breakthrough in nuclear fusion](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-13/nuclear-fusion-energy-will-likely-take-decades-to-reach-commercial-viability) is likely to spark investment in the technology that could transform the global energy landscape with nearly limitless clean energy. While that’s down from 2021, a boom year when spending exceeded $2.6 billion, it’s almost triple the amount from 2020 and the trend is clearly increasing, according to Chris Gadomski, chief nuclear analyst for BloombergNEF.

Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., where the milestone known as fusion ignition was achieved, have been studying ...

[appeal of nuclear fusion to researchers](https://www.wsj.com/articles/european-scientists-set-nuclear-fusion-energy-world-record-11644440648?mod=article_inline), as well as investors and companies, stems from its [potential as a clean-energy alternative](https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-fusion-startup-lands-1-8-billion-as-investors-chase-star-power-11638334801?mod=article_inline) to sources that involve the burning of fossil fuels and the release of greenhouse gases. The broad [a breakthrough in research on nuclear fusion](https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-fusion-energy-breakthrough-reported-by-scientists-at-u-s-lab-11670944595?mod=article_inline), bringing them one step closer to possibly changing the future of clean energy.

Key takeaways · On December 5, U.S. scientists at the National Ignition Facility in California generated more energy from a nuclear fusion reaction than they put ...

And in that century, it took so many different advances that ultimately came together to the point that we could replicate that fusion activity in this controllable way in a laboratory.” The LLNL relied largely on public grants and funding to make the nuclear energy breakthrough a reality. You have to be able to produce many, many fusion ignition events per minute, and you have to have a robust system of drivers to enable that.” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm believes that both private and public research is required to make fusion happen. With a few decades of research and investment…could put us in a position to build power plants.” But then again, the prospect of fusion energy was idealistic 50 years ago. A gain of 1.5 sounds small, and in energy terms, it is. The net energy gain from the fusion reaction is the first in human history. But last week for the first time, they designed this experiment so that the fusion fuel stayed hot enough, dense enough and round enough for long enough that it ignited. “192 laser beams entered from the two ends of the cylinder,” he said, “and struck the inner wall…. He noted that the process began with a spherical cylinder containing a small capsule, “about half the diameter of a BB.” But running a fusion reaction that requires less energy in than it puts out, a process called ignition, has eluded scientists…

Tuesday's announcement of net power gain from a nuclear fusion reaction is a major scientific breakthrough. At the same time, it will be more than a decade ...

That funding is a critical step for fusion to be commercial by the late 2030s, where most fusion industry watchers are aiming, Patel told CNBC, but it is not enough. "To put it another way, it is this moment when >1x is achieved that will make it into the history books." Also, the targets must have an efficient energy absorption rate and be mass producible," Linden told CNBC in a statement. Those concepts require new facilities to be built, so a breakthrough there will take until later this decade," Patel said. 5 experiment was the first time an energy gain over 1.0 was achieved — specifically, an energy gain of 1.5. But to make commercial fusion with lasers will require an energy gain of approximately 100x, Patel said. A little more than a year ago, in August 2021, the same laboratory had another breakthrough that Hurricane billed as "a Wright Brothers moment." Previously this had only been achieved in the detonation of nuclear weapons," explained [Tammy Ma](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tammy-ma-8050832/), a laser-plasma physicist at the lab, was waiting in an airport when her boss called her. The industry will need a whole lot more firsts The laser was designed to give us as much juice as possible to make this incredible conditions possible," Herrmann said. To get there, there will have to be many more technical breakthroughs beyond what was celebrated on Tuesday — and the money to fund them.

A new advancement in nuclear fusion was announced on Tuesday that has left scientists hopeful for the future of clean energy and climate change—here's why.

[According](https://www.iaea.org/topics/energy/fusion/faqs) to the International Atomic Energy Agency, fusion is one of the “most environmentally friendly sources of energy” because it doesn't produce any carbon dioxide or other harmful emissions. The lab produced 59 megajoules of energy in five seconds—the most amount of energy created in that amount of time. Companies like Focused Energy in the private sector have been committed to advancing nuclear fusion. According to Callahan, the startup has plans to conduct experiments that blast lasers directly on the fuel source. The experiment put in 2.05 megajoules and and generated 3.15 megajoules. [Focused Energy](https://www.focused-energy.world/), told [Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2022/12/13/national-lab-unlocks-nuclear-fusion---true-breakthrough-novelty-act-or-both/?sh=282d9ea968c7). [National Lab Unlocks Nuclear Fusion — True Breakthrough, Novelty Act, Or Both?](https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2022/12/13/national-lab-unlocks-nuclear-fusion---true-breakthrough-novelty-act-or-both/?sh=740010e868c7) (Forbes) [Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough: Can The Quest For Clean Energy Finally Help Tackle The Climate Crisis?](https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2022/12/13/nuclear-fusion-breakthrough-can-the-quest-for-clean-energy-finally-help-tackle-the-climate-crisis/?sh=610146c07d7e) (Forbes) [Scientists Achieve Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough With Blast of 192 Lasers](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/13/science/nuclear-fusion-energy-breakthrough.html) (The New York Times) For example, Vancouver, Canada-based General Fusion [announced](https://generalfusion.com/post/general-fusion-exceeds-core-technology-performance-targets-with-plasma-and-compression-prototypes/) Monday that they’re receiving great results in their progress of building a machine to produce nuclear energy in the UK. [1930s](https://www.euro-fusion.org/fusion/history-of-fusion/). However, it wasn’t until the scientists in California completed their fusion experiment that more energy was generated than put in. This development could also help with nuclear weapon research, according to Granholm. [NASA](https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/).

Fusion researchers received an early holiday present with the confirmed measurement of a laser-induced fusion reaction that produced more energy than it ...

One of the main obstacles to commercialization is the overall efficiency of the process. “This milestone moves us one significant step closer to the possibility of zero-carbon, abundant fusion energy powering our society,” Granholm said. Instead, she thinks “a few decades of research on the underlying technologies could put us in a position to build a power plant.” She also remarked that another fusion technique, called magnetically confined fusion, is in some ways closer to commercialization (see After a thorough analysis, the team demonstrated that the burn was self-sustaining, a situation that is called “ignition.” This achievement was roundly applauded, but the gain was only 0.72—putting it below the fabled gain-of-one threshold that much of the fusion community was waiting for. “From the previous result my judgement was that reaching the gain-of-one threshold was simply a matter of time—although this has come somewhat faster than I expected,” Zepf said. The excitement stems in part from the potential that the new result could have for clean energy. [Viewpoint: Fusion Turns Up the Heat](https://physics.aps.org/articles/v15/67)). The beams heat the cylinder to a few million degrees Celsius, causing it to release a torrent of x rays that heat and crush the capsule. Researchers outside of NIF have expressed admiration for the breakthrough. As a result, the fuel—a mixture of two forms of heavy hydrogen, deuterium and tritium—can briefly become hotter and denser than the Sun. The team reported yesterday at a press briefing that one of its laser-powered fusion reaction trials produced 1.5 times more energy than it consumed. PST on December 5, 2022, when NIF researchers fired 2 MJ of energy at a fuel target and recorded a fusion energy release of just over 3 MJ.

This week, American researchers achieved a major breakthrough in nuclear fusion – successfully generating more energy from a fusion reaction than was used ...

But we increasingly need our readers to fund our work. And we want to keep our journalism open and accessible to all. But how close are we to moving this from laboratories to power plants, and will it become the clean, safe, and abundant source of energy the world so desperately needs?

Let's take a look at the details of exactly has been achieved. The researchers used a high-power laser to fire 2.05 million Joules of energy into a tiny target ...

[leads the way](https://theconversation.com/nuclear-fusion-how-excited-should-we-be-177161) in many areas related to constructing a power reactor. It has had to tackle many of the same problems in order to design and build [the ITER facility](https://www.iter.org/), which also aims to produce gain and is nearing completion in the south of France. Another major limitation is that the NIF laser requires 300 million Joules of electrical input to provide two million Joules of laser light output – less than 1% efficiency. Another challenge for laser-driven fusion is bringing down the cost of the targets. Magnetic confinement involves levitating fusion fuel in the form of a plasma (charged gas) using a large magnetic field. The physics of laser-driven fusion is so complex and multifaceted that computer simulations of it often take more time than actual experiments. The targets used on NIF also rely on a technique known as Also the burst of energy was not in the form of electricity, but a pulse of energetic particles. While the fusion reactions released more energy that was put in to the target, this doesn’t take into account the far greater quantities of energy needed to fire the laser that was used to drive the experiment. Energy is released in intense bursts lasting much less than a billionth of a second, which must be repeated a few times every second to produce an average power output comparable to modern fossil-fuel based power stations. The NIF building comprises not one but 192 individual laser beams, which bounce back-and-forth over a distance of more than a kilometre before they reach the target. This corresponds to a gain of around 1.5 (2.05 x 1.5 = 3.1).